Change the way you play the Sims 3 with this top ten list of up-to-date mods and add-ons provided by the great Nraas to greatly enhance your gameplay. After trying out a few of these mods you won’t know how you ever played without em! If you have just purchased a copy of the Sims 3 or had to reinstall everything this list is perfect if you want a solid set of downloads that won’t clutter or crowd your game. Even if you installed nothing after these 10 mods you are good to go. Always remember to save and back up your files before playing around with the game folders.

This is an object mod, replacing a specific set of EA content double beds with a custom copy from Nraas that removes bed sharing restrictions. Much more realistic for inactive households, because irl people with < 70 longterm relationship are able to lay in the same bed.

This mod allows you to manipulate which books are listed at the in-game bookstore. Finally, being an author has a useful and interesting purpose because you can buy, sell, and read “Sim written” books.

This mod alters the routing interactions, the “Go Here” and “Visit Lot” interactions used either autonomously or via user-direction. Now you can have more flexibility when selecting either option, your sim can plan another action immediately after, etc

Allows you to load custom careers for your Sims. You can use this mod just for the custom careers Nraas made, because they ARE great, or you can add even more good ones from various sites.

There are useful add-ons for this mod such as:

‘Schools’ which contains custom high school careers, assigned to different rabbitholes in town
‘Part-Time’ which contains custom part-time careers that provide skills useful in later careers
‘Tones’ add an expanded set of career tones for the EA careers,
‘The Family’ which is a full-time career based on the movie “The Departed”, if that’s your thing
‘Unemployed’ is useful as a placeholder career to prevent the EA Careers system from giving your sim a job
‘Self Employed’ contains a series of self-employed careers, expanding on the Ambitions set, I’m usually a hacker
‘Homemaker’ is a useful stay-at-home career which rewards your sim for cleaning and keeping everyone happy

A very well designed and complex mod that alters the romance and woohoo interactions available to Sims. You can change the settings on everything from active/inactive relationship requirements, age restrictions for relationships, allow near relation romance (incest) or teen and adult love.

There’s two main add-ons for this mod:

‘Scoring’ adds an “attraction” scoring system that adds a new layer of depth to your sims’ relationships‘Kama Simtra’ adds an optional woohoo skill to keep track how good your sim is in bed. Now THAT’S real.

A mod to manipulate the service and role sims in your town. The mod replaces the EA Role Manager with a custom version that corrects several bugs and allows for greater flexibility. Put whoever you want on the register, you’re the god of that town.

Programmatic control of the censor grid. Much better than the NoMosaic tuning mods because this mod allows the user to choose under which conditions the censor is displayed. Because big censor blocks covering Barbie/Ken bodies sitting on a toilet is just ridulous. If you’re looking for a sim skin realistic enough to fit your newly enhance Sim universe than I suggest you check out our list of the Best Realistic Sims 3 Skins ( default and nondefault ).

This mod performs the automated maintenance and control of the inactive population in your town, ensuring your inactive sims will progress on with their lives when you are not playing them. THIS IS A NEEDED ADDITION TO THE GAME THAT YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO LIVE WITHOUT.

I highly recommend these add-ons as they enrich the game in ways you can only fully realize once you start playing:

‘Expanded’ contains the Interaction Injection portion of this mod, and other parts not specifically required for progression.
‘Extra’ contains the Map Tags system, Motive control, Inheritance, and other good stuff.
‘NameList Tuning’ is a tuning file you can add seperately with this mod to load custom name lists for use by the base-mod. Especially useful if you have a sim town of a specific ethnicity.

Nraas has also included some add ons for this mod that add certain personality elements to your sims story, you may want to read the information on the site for those (and all these mods) as there is a ton of information about these personalities and how they work. I personally find that blazing while playing Sims 3 eliminates the need for artificial storylines in this way but I may try them again in the near future to see if my experience changes. Add-on with the personality types added in parenthesis below:

An extremely useful mod that adds functionality to manage the population of your town. The mod provides manual interactions for altering sims either individually or by whatever criteria you can think of.

This mod has a few useful add-ons as well:

‘Cheats’ adds a series of more advanced or “cheaty” interactions to the MasterController base-mod menu.‘Expanded Tattoo’ expands the number of locations provided in Tattoo CAS.‘Integration’ replaces in-game interactions with custom versions that call MasterController functionality.‘Progression’ adds interactions specifically related to StoryProgression, you must have that base-mod installed as well.

Honorable Mention goes to:

AntiMagicScroll:
This mod replaces all recipes and compositions that are destroyed after a sim uses them. Because we all know how annoying and unrealistic it is when that 30 dollar recipe book vanishes in a cloud of smoke after a single sim reads it.Buy The Sims 3 Starter Pack for PC/Mac!

Written by Puff, a.k.a. Jean

A lifelong gamer, master healer, and freelance writer that’s currently making a home of Florida. Follow her on Twitter @PuffTheHealer for the occasional game related rant. Click here to find her articles on Zootgamer.

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5 comments

I can’t lie this is the best mod list ever to this day every now and then I get a porno virus messes my joint up ???? and i have to reinstall all my shit including sims 3 and i use this list and some of the others on this site as a foundation